This class is the result of many hours of research. This class was a labor of love.
It was taught at San Diego Writers, Ink on November 19, 2017 at the Ink Spot.
Jim Moreno
Cost:$60.00
First 90, 1:00 P.M. To 4:00 P.M. Women Poets
Quotes:
Joy Harjo (Muscogee): There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.
Mary Tallmountain (Koyukon): We never leave each other. When does your mouth say goodbye to your heart.
Louise Erdrich (Chippewa): Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could…Feed me honey from the rock…When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
Georgi Sanchez (Chumash): We are the stars that sing; we sing with our light.
professor Georgiana Sanchez on Chumash history and culture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieKc1z9e5as
Music To Write To:
Native American Healer Songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYyM60RlhCA
Meditations: Native American Flute Album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH8nsXpxlxU&t=1218s
Morning Relaxing Music – Positive Feelings and Energy (Adele), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuLKvcn-c7A
Rain and Native American Flutes – Relaxing Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SynzKC4fWp0&t=3764s
First Forty-Five 1: 00 P.M. To 1:45 P.M.
Read: (Indian Poems from Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry)
Joy Harjo, For Alva Benson, and For Those Who Have Learned to Speak (p. 291); Anchorage: for Audre Lorde (p. 293);
Mary Oliver, Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Branches;
Mary Tallmountain, There Is No Word For Goodbye (p.14); Matmiya (p.15);
Dorianne Laux, For the Sake of Strangers;
Louise Erdrich, The Butcher’s Wife, (p.333); Indian Boarding School; The Runaways (p. 334)
Jane Hirshfield, Lake & Maple
Georgiana Sanchez, Starry Night: Jim Moreno, The Songmother
Play Joy Harjo A Poem to Get Rid of Fear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAYCf2Gdycc
2nd Twenty 1:45 A.M. to 2:05 P.M.
Write —The ground spoke when I was born…I breathe and walk softer now…To open the door I reach for the latch…There is no word for….They always seem to find me…Give me a song…I write in my own light…
Last Thirty 2:05 P.M. To 2:35 P.M. Read
Second 90, 11:35 A.M. To 1:00 P.M. Men Poets
Quotes: Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene ): You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don’t realize it…I don’t know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.
Jimmy Santiago Baca (Apache):I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way.
N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa):We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined… There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one’s life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly.
Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma): Moments recalled like friends. It was that way or another. We’re fairly certain either way. Stories. They are with us. Time doesn’t forsake. It doesn’t soothe or decrease. Never…It is amazing how much knowledge we have of hope. Whisper bravely into the dark, heart — whisper bravely Wishtoyo Chumash Village of Malibu – Patrick Dockry Health Beauty Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMhSYKgIODA (Wishtoya Foundation)
Music To Write To
Kanyon Sings a Chumash Grandmother’s Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X4stXZJNQo&list=RD3X4stXZJNQo&t=10
Cody Blackbird Native Flute @ 2015 Malibu Chumash PW,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J6HwNP3nK0
Chumash Flute, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_39uh8p14
First Forty-Five 1: 00 P.M. To 1:45 P.M.
Read: Duane Niatum ((Salish) , Lines for Roethke 20 Years After His Death; Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem; The Dice Changer: Theodore Roethke, from In A Dark Time; The Waking, Sherman Alexie, The Powwow at the End of the World; The Business of Fancy Dancing;
Li Young Lee, Station; William Stafford, Ask Me; Chief Dan George, They Speak to Me; Jimmy Santiago Baca (Apache/Chicano), Ancestor.
Play: Return to Rainy Mountain; Forgive Our Fathers – Smoke Signals
Momaday on Imagination and Language 6:00.
2nd Twenty 1:45 to 2:05 P.M. Write: I sleep like thorns on a rose…Rejoice in the story that… Eagle, Hawk, Crow, One day you said to me…The light that settles in my bones…I unmask your face…In a dark time…I am Far Walker…Take the lively path…While others sleep…I am told I must forgive…My dance is like a….
Last Thirty 2:05 P.M. To 2:35 P.M. Read
Bibliography
-
Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, Edited by Duan Niatum, Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco, 1988.
-
A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding & Writing Poetry, Mary Oliver, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego, 1994.
-
Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Collected Poems, Duane Niatum, Holy Cow! Press, 1991.
-
Earth Vowels, Duane Niatum, Mongrel Empire Press, Norman Oklahoma, 2017.
-
If You Want To Write: A Book About Art, Independence, & Spirit, Brenda Ueland, Graywolf Press, 2002.
-
In The Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, Steve Kowit, Tilbury House, Gardiner, Maine, 1995.
-
Introduction, Richard Hugo, The American Poetry Review, November/December, 1975.
-
Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love &Revelation, Edited by Roger Housden, Harmony Books, New York, 2003.
-
Soothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral American Indian Literature, Brian Swann, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983, p. 3.
-
The Native American & Contemporary Art: A Dilemma, Fritz Scholder, Book Forum, Volume V, # 3, 1981, p. 423.
-
The Writing Life, Annie Dillard, Harper Perennial, USA, 1989.
-
Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg, Shambhala Publications, 2006.
Quotes:
Richard Hugo: We’ve inherited ruined worlds that, before they were ruined, gave (us) a sense of self-esteem, social unity, spiritual certainty, and being “at home” on the earth…The cultural tradition does not just exist in the memory. It exists in act, thought, speech, the ritualistic discovery of kinship.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux): Writing for me is an act of defiance born by the need to survive.
Simon J. Ortiz(Acoma Pueblo): Writing is an act that defies oppression.
Fritz Scholder (Luiseno): Painting, like most of the visual arts, is an individual activity that is completely personal, and can only be developed through one’s own unique frame of reference. If one is to make a statement in whatever medium, one must find out who one is and fully accept it.
Mary Oliver: Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life.
Quotes for Healing the Past:
Canada apologized On 11 June 2008, to its Indigenous peoples for its past actions that eroded “the political, economic and social systems of Aboriginal people and nations”. The government acted on a report which had been tabled two years earlier.
From the 19th century until the 1970s—dates very similar to Australia’s own history—more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were required to attend state-funded schools in an attempt to assimilate them into Canadian society [40] and the purpose of “killing the indian in the child” [33]. They were forbidden from speaking their native languages or participating in cultural practices.
There were an estimated 130 Residential Schools across Canada. An estimated 90,000 survivors fight to have their stories recorded.
The last Residential School closed in 1996.
In May 2006 the Canadian government reached a CDN$1.9-billion settlement to compensate survivors. Source: https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/sorry-apology-to-stolen-generations#ixzz4wdymcPQi
Films:
We Were Children (directed by Tim Wolochatiuk, 2011, 83 min) chronicles the profound impact of the Canadian government’s residential school system through the eyes of two children who were forced to face hardships beyond their years. As young children, Lyna and Glen were taken from their homes and placed in church-run boarding schools, where they suffered years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, the effects of which persist in their adult lives.
The Making of Rabbit Proof Fence – Full length Featurette
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWblj80ZTYk
Links:
Canadian Federal Government Apology to First Nations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCpn1erz1y8Australian
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apology speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKWfiFp24rA
Stolen Children | Residential School survivors speak out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdR9HcmiXLA
complete the PayPal payment for the desired class to enroll. If you have more questions about a specific course please use the contact form or send me an email at jimmoreno95@gmail.com. After payment completion, you will be sent to the course page, where all the course materials will be given. Please be respectful of the amount of time and work that has gone into the creation of these courses as well as this website. We kindly ask that you do not share the content with others.